Scents and sensibilities

Whether in cooking or in classical dance, Sushmita Ghosh is aware of a fragrant past

November 19, 2014 03:53 pm | Updated 03:53 pm IST

Sushmita Ghosh at Chew Pan Asian Cafe in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Photo: Sandeep Saxena

Sushmita Ghosh at Chew Pan Asian Cafe in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Photo: Sandeep Saxena

It is a weekday afternoon and New Delhi’s Connaught Place is relatively quiet. The expensive shops offer an inviting respite from the afternoon sun, which can still get overbearing. The eyes of the uniformed doormen-guards standing at every entrance follow passersby lazily and for the most part harmlessly. The paanwallah in the shaded arcade is relaxed. Business takes a meandering pace at this time, and the traffic is manageable.

That’s why there is space to scan the old buildings of CP’s outer circle for the sign of Chew Pan Asian Cafe. A relatively new restaurant (whose information-packed name gives us a reasonable idea of what to expect), it is located in M Block on the first floor. This is where I have arranged to meet Sushmita Ghosh, noted Kathak exponent and currently Director, Kathak Kendra, the national institute for Kathak. Sushmita, who learnt from Munna Shukla, Reba Vidyarthi and Tirath Ram Azad in Delhi, besides receiving guidance from Rohini Bhate of Pune, spent 12 years of her early career in England. While there, she worked with Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and the Academy of Indian Dance and created training programmes for students learning South Asian dance. For over a decade now she has been back in India. Sushmita was directing the Aakriti Foundation, an organisation she founded while in England as “a platform to promote understanding and practice of Indian classical dance in its totality, and its interconnections with other art disciplines.” However, for the past 10 months approximately, she has been in the director’s seat at Kathak Kendra.

Sushmita, whose work in England included creating the first Kathak syllabus for the Imperial Society for Teachers of Dancing, is keenly interested in the ways in which the classical arts, rooted in the past, can best be transmitted in a changing India. Her students from places like Finland and England still visit her in India. “They’ve become part of the extended family,” she says. It’s commonplace now for eager learners from foreign countries to come to India in search of an understanding of its classical dances and the positives they impart to one’s life, but just as common for Indian parents to pull their children out of a dance class as soon as they enter class X.

As we talk — how to bridge the gap between ordinary city residents and the classical arts, how the new generation of performers approaches the classical arts, what are the responsibilities of taxpayer funded art institutions — our table finds itself loaded with colour.

A dish of prawns salt and pepper arrives on the chef’s recommendation, along with Thai crispy tossed vegetables. Then there is crispy lotus stem. The finely sliced, spicy, crackly yet soft lotus stems make a winner of a serving. Dim sums — crystal greens corn dumplings — complete the wholesome foursome. The food, its freshness palpable, is too good to be ignored for long, even if we are talking in distressed tones about how the general public’s mindset towards artists in general, and dancers in particular, needs to change. “It’s very good food,” agrees Sushmita.

As a soloist Sushmita has performed in many parts of India and the world. Now, though, with new responsibilities and many more students whose future is to be considered, her solos “hmmm...seem to have taken a back seat.” We wash down the fragrant dishes with green tea. Speaking of fragrances, it was through her sense of smell that Sushmita taught herself to cook, she recalls.

“The ‘niramish’ kitchen was devised in Bengal,” she explains. This was the kitchen reserved for widowed women in the family, who were supposed to eat lightly spiced food prepared in a secluded part of the house. The simple food became part of Bengali cuisine,” says Sushmita.

“I grew up with that fragrance, of the tadka (tempering), which we call phodon. It could be mustard, or methi (fenugreek). There is not so much jeera. When I went to England and started cooking, I would go by the scent. I would put one tadka and say, no, it doesn’t smell right. Then I would try another.” Bengali cuisine, she says, is “quite delicate and subtle.” Take sandesh, the milk sweet. “To me it feels a little more subtle than just milk. Of course I might be completely biased because I grew up with it,” she remarks.

“My father loved food. Also, I’ve travelled to so many places. Food is part of the culture. And when we take it out of the culture and place it somewhere else, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” she muses.

She cites the example of cheese, increasingly available in India. Cheese, she notes, was a product of cold terrains like Europe because of the large amounts of milk there and the climate. We don’t have excess milk here and we don't have so much cold....” Now there’s something for the globalisers to think about. But then, some imports are admittedly delicious. Like Chew’s Banofee Pie. A dish to soothe frayed nerves and instil hope in the hardiest cynic, it has the light creaminess of cheesecake, the firm pastry of a pie, the freshness of banana and the sweetness of toffee! Just the dessert to turn our next task — wading through CP’s rush hour crowds — into a cakewalk.

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